Now, finally, Comicon stories!
This was the third time ever I had attended the Boston Comic Book Convention, the second time I'd participated at a booth, and the first time I'd been there all weekend. It was a very long and exhausting weekend in general (it took a couple of days to sleep off the "Convention Lag"), but I had a lot of fun.
I met a lot of really awesome people and exchanged lots of postcards with other illustrators. illustration isn't a very social career choice, and artists are not particularly outgoing animals anyway. It's a big deal when the opportunity to get out and meet others of our kind comes up. Such opportunities are rare so anytime large numbers of artists get to talk face-to-face is fantastic.
I didn't get much of a chance to walk around and talk to people until the second day as I was busy promoting the Comicbook Artists Guild. I've run my own table at a convention once and the stress was almost not worth it. Being a CAG member means I can volunteer at their convention table with other members, which means that I can promote myself and get up and stretch my legs (something I took way too little advantage of as my knees are all too happy to remind me that I am no longer a very young person) and have plenty of people around to talk to instead of going stir-crazy. This is a pretty big deal.
Since most CAG New England meetings happen in Connecticut, I don't get to meet other members in person that often. It was great to finally meet face to face and make some new friends. I don't know any other artists in The World Outside the Internet, so it was downright refreshing to actually talk about the stupidity of the big comic publishers, the aggravating fact that you should be able to say "Hi, I'm a Furry artist" without normal people immediately assuming... that*, the awesome that is Bruce Campbell, movies that were potentially awesome until the executives got involved, and why "Space Jam" may be the single most evil thing ever done by a major studio. And, uh, art.
* - I love Watership Down and "The Secret of N.I.M.H." My art centers around animals and all of my characters are animals. I am NOT into the weird stuff.
A lot of people visited our table, even though we were in kind of a weird space (right between the men's room and the cafeteria). We gave applications to lots of potential new members, some of whom took good advantage of the "come as your favorite character and get in free" offer. Here's a gallery of some of my favorites:
Mario and Princess Daisy. We got into a long, long conversation about scary Twilight fangirls. Fortunately, Twilight fans seemed to be largely absent from this con.
I love it when more people remember that there were several Robins, and a few of them were female. I didn't even notice her awesome rings until she posed for us. The guy in the horrifying Scooby Doo costume just happened to be lurking in the background.
Black Cat, Elektra, and Wolverine were at the convention both days and while this was the only time they stopped to talk, we saw them quite a lot.
This guy's Marv costume was amazing. He talked to us about CAG for a good long time too.
And inevitably, there were lots and lots of Boba Fetts, though I saw a lot of Rorschach masks as well. I like how the kid implies that Boba got into his dad's business early.
There's more -much more- to say about BCC, but it'll have to wait until the next post. I actually ran out of promotional postcards about an hour before I left -- but that's definitely a good thing.
